Bitcoin Forum

This might have been answered elsewhere but couldn't find it, if it has.

The miners get paid less and less as time goes on. 
With the ledger also growing bigger and bigger, wouldn't the cost of mining start to exceed the profitability of mining?  If no one would mine bitcoins anymore, wouldn't it shut the whole system down?

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Thanks to moore's law, performance of mining hardware improves over time. While power consumption decreases. The value of bitcoin also increases.

These factors coupled together can translate to greater net dollar rewards, even if BTC rewards halve every 3 years.

Everything miners are able to earn past their break even point is free money. Long term, electricity consumption and hash rate difficulty, become the main factors.

I hate to disagree but we are reaching the current computational speed meaning that the microchips are reaching the limit of their size to make a faster standard computer and our only hope of not going to a flat line in computational speed is to develop quantum computers. Not to mention our battle with renewable energy is just getting started, we have a lot of new start ups that promises to create but the problem is not creating a generator but creating an energy storage. I have to agree with you though about the profit, no matter the amount, profit is profit.

This is scary but is totally happening now. Mining pools wouldn't be a thing if Bitcoin is forgiving in the mining department but as more amd more people start to mine for coins, those who took advantage of the technology earlier than others will always earn a much bigger and vonsiderable amount compared to those who didn't. In a few years from now, Mining wouldn't be profitable at all because of the people's demand overcoming the supply.

Miners don't have to maintain the entire ledger, just a block at a time. The cost of mining is not affected by the size of the block chain.

Miners will mine Bitcoin as long as it is profitable, and Bitcoin is designed such that mining is always profitable for some miners.

The thing is as time goes on, mining difficulty will increase for certain as more people join to mine, so the reward will reduce as all or most miners as already joined mining pool, also the mining reward do halve in every 210,000 blocks that are mined which take approximately 4 years, this will also reduce mining reward. But, this is reflecting directly on bitcoin not on bitcoin price as bitcoin valuate and increase in price when compared to fiat, people will still use fiat like dollar to calculate the price of bitcoin. As the bitcoin price is increasing, this makes mining still profitable. If bitcoin can continue to increase in price, it will help miners to still gain.

You need to understand the difficulty adjustment algorithm. If it takes longer to produce blocks because miners are switching off, the difficulty will drop, which means the profitability will increase. With the lowest possible difficulty it's possible for just one person to mine on their CPU, which is what Satoshi did in early days. If mining becomes unprofitable, then the difficulty will drop until it becomes profitable, simple as that.

Yes, bitcoin is a currency, but we cannot know if it will remain so in the future. It does, however, have many properties that might make it viable in the long run. Bitcoins are used online as a medium of exchange for thousands of people around the globe.

Many have said we're reaching upper theoretical limits for electron tunneling and other variables. This is a common theme for the last 10+ years. I remember people repeating word for word what you're saying there in like 2007. That argument hasn't completely killed innovation and advancement. But it has slowed its pace.

Initially moore's law predicted transistors on an area would double every year. This was accurate for a time through the 1970s and 1980s. Due to theoretical limits and developmental difficulty increasing, the pace slowed to doubling every 2 years. In the future it could slow further to every 2.5 years or higher.

If limits are someday reached, I think performance increases could continue by focusing on other aspects and areas. Faster memory & alternatives to hard disks like SCSI drives can dramatically improve performance. As we've seen with SSDs. The architecture could improve. As could organizational proficiency through AI assisted design. There are many areas with potential for improvement no one is working on atm.

Don't forget that the ASICs are specially designed to solve specific problems (in this case, bitcoin hashes) and show even more immense performance potential.

I think bitcoin is viable and will remain viable in the next ten or more years.

If many miners stop mining, you'll see a newer batch of miners taking the advantage by that time. As you see the rate of mined btc per block gets lower due to halving, the price of bitcoin increases in return.

The difficulty will be lesser if the idea you had which will make no miners left. But that would open up an opportunity for another players to come in and get to mine bitcoin. Don't you worry, it is highly unlikely that miners would stop mining.

Is obvious that no one can concludes on bitcoin now, emphasising if it will remain in future, basically bitcoin can remain in future because it's a decentralized currency which everyone is aware so far, except government across the world will raise against bitcoin and introduce their coin that will be higher than bitcoin, and if such happened the coin management by worldwide government shall be centralized coins like banking system of fiat currency, so anything centralized coins can't be compare with Btc, so I believe btc will exist more than our expectations.

Wow this analysis is very helpful. Loved the way you represented Moore Law here. This makes me comfortable and confident about my mining. Though I am not mining bitcoin primarily but this calculation is surely applicable to all the types of mining. Over the time I know electricity costs and energy that was spent will be paid back. The prime factor is change in the prices. Just imagine who ever was mining at the rate of 150 USD per ETH or 7K USD per BTC are now in complete profit and all their expenses are already paid off with extra profits tbh.

Moreover we are at the stage where 88% of supply is already mined and the lesser the supply, more is the demand.

So yeah with the above support statement I do believe bitcoin is completely viable.

Because of its features and fundamentals, it is viable, you have interest growing globally, thus driving volume on exchanges such as Binance/Kraken up and institutions that are involved and bitcoin services are being built.

Not only from the perspective of their small payment, in this case, with the smaller supply, the miners are competing to occupy the seats that have been determined in number. the rest will be laid off and return to unemployment by having a number of bitcoin. on the side of the line technology takes precedence over miners. then the quality of the miners will be tested, but the payment fee will not be increased.

after all, where are they going? Will Bitcoin be recycled, or will it be added to a supply that has recently been buried on wasted hard drives? I am not sure

Only 12% of BTC is left for mining which doesn't seem like much, although the total figure is just under 2.5 million BTC which doesn't seem like an insignificant amount at all. Currently, it is a profitable business for those who have enough money for the initial investment, and above all have cheap electricity.

The fact is that in some 10 years 99% of the total supply will be mined, and that 1% will remain for the next hundred years. Compared to today, only 210 000 BTC will remain - and it will be really interesting to see how the whole thing will be set up then, and whether the mining will be profitable as today. Given the reward per block of just over 1.5 BTC after halving 2028, the price would have to be many times higher than it is today to justify the costs - can it even be calculated in advance at least approximately what numbers we are talking about?

People look at bitcoin as "digital gold" so long as it has value, it will remain viable. As mentioned by others, miners will mine less and less bitcoin after every halving but the price shoots up consequently. With better adoption in the future, who knows where the price can go. Its still pretty early on the crypto space. IMO, miners won't stop even in the long run because it stands to be profitable despite the costs.

Not unless quantum computers take over?  :o

If the price stays same or goes lower, then yes. Miners would go bankrupt and the system would collapse. As long as the price climbs up, they will be happy.

There will always some people who'll mine btc with whatever device they got (cpu, gpu, asic whatever) without checking the prices though and there will also some people who get their electricity for free (thieves) and as long as btc is become complete dog poo, it will keep attracingt these people.  8)

You should know that bitcoin's usefulness and user base are growing in popularity. Bitcoin mining farms have two main sources of income, block rewards and network transaction fees. Even if, Bitcoin halving - it always creates value for miners. After each halving cycle, the value of bitcoin is always high. At the same time, high gas also gives the miners a source of life.

We can see that the price of Bitcoin continues to rise. 

Hence, mining is still a profitable business.  The cause of all economic crises under capitalism is the fall in energy consumption.  Bitcoin solves this problem. 

In my opinion, in the future, Bitcoin will become a guarantee of the stability of the global economy.  The main holders of full nodes will not be individuals or even corporations, but individual countries. 

At the same time, Bitcoin will be the official world reserve currency.

mining right now is not a good way to make a profit, almost half of the miners choose to leave and switch to trading. for me mining bitcoin has a big fee and a big risk, the best way is to trade and it can happen in a short time to get profit

Bitcoin is valuable one. So trading the bitcoin. If price will be low. That time is wring time to buy a bitcoin. Now bitcoin prices is increase. So check the bitcoin prices day by day. It good opportunity for future saving. Mining is not easy to mining the bitcoin. Trading is best option for the invest the bitcoin.

This is the wrong way to think about it.

Bitcoin is intended to be deflationary. At the outset (and still today) inflation is quite high. This inflation is bootstrapping the system by increasing the incentives for strong mining security.

High inflation is not the natural state of the system, long term.

The block reward should probably be expected to drop from here. At the same time, limited block size should facilitate increased fee income for miners over time because increasing adoption = increased demand for limited block space.

It's very possible that hash rate and block rewards eventually find relatively stable equilibrium ranges once the inflation rate significantly drops.

There are no easy answers to this question. While everyone loves to quote Moore's law, they forget that Moore's law was enabled by a decreasing transistor size and lithography techniques. Already at 7nm, industry is finding it hard to justify the increased costs of producing the chips compared to the incremental speed benefit from them.

The power consumption and transistor sizes are reaching fundamental limits. Although research is still ongoing, even if we find miners that are faster and infinitely low power consumption, then bitcoin will have at one point evolve usage volumes and fees to such a level that the fee market can remain attractive to the miners.

The mining industry has to be seen similar to other industries that evolved over time like Railways, Power plants, Smelting etc. Continuous returns and a desire to squeeze more profits ensured that these industries continued to evolve along with more money poured into developing technologies for them. Right now, that revenue is the healthy block subsidy. When it reduces to very low levels, the industry will have to find a way to continue the profits. This is why growth of L2 solutions and then applications/ services on top of them are important.

It's highly unlikely that mining would shut down completely because mining isn't centralized. In addition, mining difficulty is recalculated every two weeks / 2016 blocks. So, even if no one else was mining, and it was just you, it still would be really difficult to mine, until the difficulty was recalculated. Once difficulty was recalculated, and it became easier to mine, there would be an incentive for people to mine again because it would become easier. So, what would it do to the price, I don't know. It's a hypothetical that won't occur. However, it does demonstrate the genius of dynamic mining difficulty.

It is a supply and demand math. If miners feel that mining profit is very low, some of them might quit doing that until the profit is affordable for miners to keep up with.

Moreover, bitcoin prices seem to increase every four years, and even though bitcoin rewards can be halved, with a good resource of mining equipment, you can have a stable income with it. In China, there are likely more than 100 bitcoin mining farms, including bitmain. Sounds like a fascinating industry,right?

If the price of Bitcoin is getting more expensive, and the mining reward we know is decreasing because of the halving,
I don't think it is a problem, because compared to before the halving the price of Bitcoin is still under $ 10k, and now it's more than $ 30k,
how about it? I think bitcoin is still very feasible to use and used by new miners.

I don't think it ever was about purchasing a significant amount of equipment that is specifically created to mine cryptocurrencies. It was all about "1 CPU = 1 vote", which in theory sounds quite fair. The mining part of the network will probably "centralize" upon a few mining pools soon, I can agree with that, but there will likely be a solution coming soon for that too. But speaking about technology early investment and advantages, early birds will obviously always be ahead of the game no matter how much you change the system..

That is the logical sequence of the decreased mining rewards per block and the price of bitcoin correlates. I watched a Youtube video from China miners 5 years ago and it's said that they're mining 20-25 bitcoins per day. But think of it 5 years ago how much the price of bitcoin by that time. And if we'll think of it how much they're getting today, it's totally lesser than 5 years ago but if it's still profitable for them because the price has increased a lot, they are on a continuous operation.

I don’t really know about this, although they say that things got really tough for miners, but I think it only got tough for those who are individual miners. At first, anyone can mine Bitcoin, as long as you have your computer and a miner you can mine Bitcoin anywhere, but this time around you can’t mine it yourself, you will have to join a pool to be able to profit from it.

It is no longer as easy as it used to be from the start for individual miners, but there are still big companies that mine it and they have everything that’s needed to mine Bitcoin and they are profiting from it I believe. And though the reward is being halved, the worth still increases, which means they are definitely gaining from it.

It is also about the new tech as well, miners who have the most elite equipment with very low electricity (and even maybe free) could make a profit from bitcoin very very easily even on the most bottom prices, while people who have very old equipment and high electricity can't make a profit even at 40k per bitcoin prices.

I know some people who stopped their GPU mining very recently because they weren't making a profit, can you imagine not making a profit during this period? Dude said he had been mining for three years and his machines broke down too frequently to make it worthwhile, I suppose he didn't took care of them very well but in the end if you are not good at it, you will lose and if you are spending for the latest tech and take care of it and smart investment, you could make a lot of profit. It is all about your situation and if it is profitable or not.

With all that is going on with the miners at the moment, bitcoin's future might unsecured. As time passes by, there's a possibility that mining would get more and more difficult. Even with the advancement of technology, miners might get tired of receiving low profits from what they are doing and it is quite understandable. Everyone wants progress in their lives even them. They play a vital role on keeping the system running so I think they should receive what they deserve.

Bitcoin is valuable one. Bitcoin price is any time to up and down. So most of the people wait for the bitcoin price increase. If price will be low people will be invest on time. Then wait for the price up. Then people will be sell the bitcoin. Most of the people hold the bitcoin for future purpose.

Of course it is viable and with time it actually becomes more profitable for miners willing to hold. If you'd start mining in 2016, you'd be told everywhere that mining is for people with a lot of money. They'd tell you to stop dreaming about making money with mining because the market is dominated by China and that you'll barely make ROI, but if you mined and held, you'd make so much money that you'd be able to mine for another 50 years without taking any profit. Literally, miners who did that 5 years ago could keep on mining and paying their electricity bills for another 50 years using the coins they mined in 2016. It can look grim from a newcomer's perspective, but veterans of this industry have so much money that they could keep it going all by themselves if they wanted to, without any new miners joining in.


Bitcoin good. Trading good. Posting good. Making money. Prices low. All fine. Mom made dinner. Me eat now. Bye bye.

That is why the individual miners are shutting down their businesses since it's more or less more profitable for the big mining companies. In a recent news I read how nvidia is thinking of coming into the mining market again. At the same time the price of bitcoins is rising too.

1. Price is increasing
2. Big companies generally keep the cost balanced

I do think it's profitable for the individual miners only when :
1. They have their own cheap renewable source of electricity
2. For countries where the electrical power is free and the people are allowed to mine bitcoins.

We cannot say this statement as a universal guide and tell people how mining is not profitable anymore plus they get the coins not just from mining but at the same time from transactions etc.

So this actually depends. If it had been so unprofitable then Nvidia would not think of coming in the business again.

THis is exactly part of what drives price up. If profitability of mining is too little, miners would drop. There's increasing concerns about the effect of BTC due to its carbon footprint, this way there's a balance between viability and power consumption. Currently there might be more miners than necessary, but eventually even that will level off as well.

The adoption of bitcoin doesn't become global acceptance, that's why it's impossible to promote this to everyone who wanted financial independence. But, on several countries who've been using it already like in Philippines as part of Asia; more people is now benefited by its advantages. Right now we're able to use bitcoin on basic needs like mobile loads, bills payments and other online payment related stuff.